Provided you can fill your comic with snappy one-liners for t-shirts, you’d be set for merchandising.

As for XKCD, I’d give it’s Niche a 4 value. Why? It’s all all around slashdot/digg/nerd-chic comic. It’s dealing with a variety of subjects that highly computer literate people flock to. These are the types of people who will seek out nerdy jokes like this. Niche value is quite complicated, which is it’s biggest problem. Besides, two of XKCD’s biggest exports are math and sarcasm, mathematicians are known to have rather strange senses of humor.Most of XKCD’s quality is in it’s writing.

Dean: I’m glad you enjoyed this. I love your comic!

Now xkcd describes itself as follows:

“A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”

Now, I’m not sure how many people can relate to all four of those elements. I’m certainly no math nerd, that’s for sure. So, what’s the niche value there?

Also, since xkcd is a stick figure comic, what’s the quality there?

See, I think that’s all subjective. Heck, from my experience, I think there are more horror fans on the internet than there are comic fans. And there are certainly more Westerns and Horror movies out in theatres than there are superhero movies. And certainly more Hot Topics and Goth / Horror stores than there are comic stores.

I disagree, some comics just won’t be as successful as others, and some will lose out on a lot of attention mostly because they don’t play to a certian niche value.

Again, I think there are several factors that are taken out of consideration with an equation like this. As I said earlier, this doesn’t take into account that a creator might totally change art styles or their approach to the webcomic. Take GIRLS WITH SLINGSHOTS for example, that strip went from fine-line rendering to more symplistic art style in the course of a year - did that increace or decrease it’s potential? How much does a ‘comic viewer’ affect the equation?

I mean, I like the ‘idea’ of a webcomic equation, but I think there are several factors that are missing … the most crucial is that ‘a good story is a good story’ regardless of genre or niche.

If I were to do High Moon I’d get [(8+6)]2=28.

It doesn’t mean you have a bad webcomic, but instead, your niche value is pretty low. Most people who like westerns probably wouldn’t seek out a western webcomic, and the horror elements may put them off. Your highest potential niche value comes from direct horror fans, but horror comics are so rare on the internet they may not stumble upon High Moon.

Of course, this is all in good fun anyway. It’s interesting to see how the numbers work.